New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery's music was once described by NPR journalist Lars Gotrich as "swimming through phantoms" – it may sound like an overwrought analogy at first, but simply spend half an hour enveloped in Montgomery's tones, and you'll understand. Originally a part of Pin Group in the 1980s, releasing Joy Division-indebted post-punk on the revered Wellington label Flying Nun records, Montgomery eventually unmoored himself from the strictures of verse-chorus-verse songwriting, and other musicians entirely, composing drifting, gauzy guitar instrumentals that channeled his own personal grief and loneliness into a seductively baleful magic.